Transcript
In Their Court
Episode 2: No Girls Allowed
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IBTIHAJ MUHAMMAD, HOST, NBC: It's 1981. We're crowded a grainy old TV set. It's the national championship, the game that teams all over the country have been working towards.
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MUHAMMAD: Of the 24 teams invited to the tournament, just two remain. The first are the Louisiana Tech Lady Techsters, coached by the legendary Sonja Hogg.
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MUHAMMAD: And the second, the Tennessee Lady Volunteers. Led by another luminary Pat Summit.
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MUHAMMAD: In the starting lineup is one of the nation's best players, Pam Kelly. She's a six-foot tall center from Columbia Louisiana, the star player recruited by Sonja Hogg a few years earlier.
PAM KELLY, AMERICAN BASKETBALL PLAYER: I remember everybody yelling and screaming. You know we had our fans that followed us all over the country, wherever we went. Tennessee had their fans that followed them all over the country.
So you know if was just back and forth yelling and screaming. Well I think we were all probably nervous. Playing Tennessee was like being on edge. You know you had to go out there ready to play because, if you didn't, they was going to run you off the floor.
MUHAMMAD: But there isn't too much time to think about the competition because the games begun.
KELLY: I probably got the first four or five shots of the game, and they were blocked.
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MUHAMMAD: Pam finally scores but the Lady Techsters still trailed Tennessee by a point.
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MUHAMMAD: Fast forward to the end of the game and what Coach Summit feared has come true. Louisiana Tech is in the lead.
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PAT SUMMIT, AMERICAN BASKETBALL COACH: It's just about the only thing Tennessee can do right now is try and foul.
MUHAMMAD: Sonja Hogg is on her feet in a sharp teal suit. The game is almost hers.
SUMMIT: This is what it's all about.
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MUHAMMAD: That day cemented the Lady Techsters in basketball history. It was their first national championship, and it wouldn't be their last.
KELLY: At the end of the game, when we were victorious, we all jumped around and hugged and shouted and cried. And looking back now to know that we went undefeated and entered our season with a great team like Tennessee just tells me that we were special and that we were a great team.
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MUHAMMAD: And the organization that hosted the whole thing, no it wasn't the NCAA, it was probably an organization you've never heard of before.
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MUHAMMAD: The AIAW had just run a massive tournament. Thousands of fans of piled in to watch these games unfold. With NBC broadcasting the whole thing live. All of this when just a decade earlier you'd be hard pressed to find a college campus that offered a well-funded women's sports program.
And this wasn't just any ordinary sports organization, it was one for women. Just women. This was womankind's response to the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the organization that had overseen men's college sports for almost a century.
But this moment of glory would be short lived. In just a little over a year, this organization would cease to exist.
UNKNOWN: I don't know if you will be able to capture the devastation that took with the NCAA takeover.
MUHAMMAD: I'm Ibtihaj Muhammad and this is, "In Their Court," a series about the ups and downs of Title IX told through the rich history of women's basketball. Today we dive into an all-out gender war between the AIAW and the NCAA.
UNKNOWN: The NCAA still does not care about women's athletics. It has mastered the art of discrimination and the exploitation of student athletes.
CAROLE OGLESBY, PHYSICAL EDUCATOR AND AUTHOR: I was born in 1938 so it was a very pink and blue time. Girls did certain things, boys did other things and if you didn't sort of go along with the script you were looked at as different, special, but different.
MUHAMMAD: That's Dr. Carole Oglesby. In the 1960s, she played softball on a national level.
OGLESBY: Through all of my childhood I had the very sport-oriented household. My dad had been on the border of being a professional baseball player and my mother actually played high school basketball. She actually played a championship.
She always said it was the proudest moment of her life, forget about children and marriage. Playing the high school basketball championship was her top moment. That was very different from most other girls, especially in the Midwest. A sport was a male domain and so me and my mother were unusual.
MUHAMMAD: But it wasn't by any means uncommon. There were young women all around the country who just want to get out there and play ball, just like the boys got to.
DONNA LOPIANO, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF SPORTS MANAGEMENT RESOURCES: I definitely grew up as a tomboy. At the time that was not a complement. It was a label attached to you to diminish your power. But I took it as a compliment that, you know, I was as good as a boy.
MUHAMMAD: That's Donna Lopiano, another national softball champion who played around the same time as Carole in the 1960s. Both women just loved sports.
LOPIANO: I grew up on a street with 15 boys and one other girl and I don't think I knew I was a girl until I was 10 years old and tried out for little league baseball with all of my male friends and then was told that I couldn't play because I was girl.
They told me I couldn't play the little league because of a forward rule on page 14 on the right-hand side of the little league rulebook that said no girls are allowed.
And that was very hurtful, I cried for three months, because I had to watch my friends every night play little league, and have uniforms, and do the things I wanted to do. But I had parents who were persistent in trying to find a place for me to play.
And they hunted all around Stratford, Connecticut where I grew up, looking for a women's softball league, because women weren't playing baseball at the time. But I wasn't old enough because all of the women's softball leagues were sponsored teams, and you had to be 16, working age.
So it wasn't until I was 15-1/2 that I finally tried out for the Raybestos Brakettes, which was a team sponsored by the Raybestos Manhattan Corporation. They were national champions at the time. And so I was very lucky to grow up in Connecticut 30 miles from a championship women's softball team. I thought I died and went to heaven; it was like a league of their own.
MUHAMMAD: That sense of camaraderie, that sense of belonging was something both Donna and Carole found through sports.
OGLESBY: Those women that I was playing softball with were by dearest and closest friends, they were my best buddies.
MUHAMMAD: It started to become clear to them how hollowed these spaces were where women could compete, lose, encourage each other to try again, and win. And so, in about a decade these two women would hang up their gloves and join the same team.
OGLESBY: Donna Lopiano is a member of a sorority as I am a member of a sorority, and that would be the AIAW presidents.
MUHAMMAD: The Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, or the AIAW was born in 1971, one year before Title IX was enacted. It actually wasn't the first organization of its kind.
OGLESBY: The Division for Girls and Women in Sport was the professional organization of women physical educators, and it had been in existence since the late 1800s. This is a very old and well-known organization.
MUHAMMAD: Carole says that this predecessor to the AIAW, known as the DGWS was focused on helping women enjoy sports as a hobby. The organization was against competition for highly skilled athletes.
OGLESBY: They had been active in sort of keeping a lid on the highly skilled programs for a long time.
MUHAMMAD: By the early 1970s, Carole had become a coach and faculty member at Purdue University. She says many of the women she knew and worked with were starting to feel like what the DGWS offered wasn't enough.
OGLESBY: There was a cadre of women like me who thought, we've got to go someplace. You, DGWS, you're really discriminating against the highly skilled woman by having no programs.
MUHAMMAD: And so this group of women started putting together big, competitive championships for all kinds of women's sports. And the reception they received were very enthusiastic.
OGLESBY: We were just overwhelmed with hundreds of people that wanted to bring their teams to these championships, it was so incredibly popular. It was impossible to try to figure out who to invite, and who not. So it immediately -- almost immediately became apparent we needed to have a membership organization where there would be regional championships -- local regional championships that would lead to the nationals.
MUHAMMAD: That's how in 1971, the AIAW came to be. Representatives from 280 schools, coaches, and administrators put together this association. And the person who was picked to lead them? None other than Carole Oglesby.
OGLESBY: I really had an inside track to get elected to be the first president, the women that ran against me was a local person from Indiana, and she was a highly proficient and professional person. But in a way, I felt like didn't stand a chance because I had been flying all around the United States going to these championships for 18 months.
MUHAMMAD: In those early days there was a lot of anxiety about how an organization like the AIAW would position itself in the world of sports. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, or the NCAA, had been around since the early 1900s, they had their ways of operating. But the women at the AIAW wanted to run things a little differently.
Here's Donna Lopiano.
LOPIANO: If you looked at the difference between AIAW and NCAA, the NCAA you don't come to a convention to hear the pros and cons and then determine the vote. Your vote is already determined before you arrive.
At the AIAW convention, we would take four hours on one proposal, and try to get enough votes right there and then and stay up until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning to figure out how to pass something, or how to make it better. That was the beauty of the organization, I thought, that it truly was a great, deliberative assembly.
MUHAMMAD: The AIAW also had a very different relationship to money.
LOPIANO: Money -- money corrupts. It makes you play politics, and women's athletics was pure at the time. Nobody had money. We were into how are we going to make this the best developmental experience for young women that they could ever imagine? It was all about how can we make this extracurricular activity something really special to the growth of women?
The men were in just the opposite place, they were discovering big television money. They were beginning to exploit male athletes with scholarships. We're just coming at it from completely different ways. One was athlete exploitation, one was athlete growth and development, and never the two shall meet.
MUHAMMAD: That was a core tenant of the AIAW. The organization was largely funded by university dues. Schools pay their way to tournaments and most of the AIAW staff worked as volunteers. They didn't want college athletes to be treated like many professionals, women, who needed to be recruited with generous scholarships just to play ball.
The AIAW was trying to cultivate smart, well-rounded student athletes. Women whose characters were being developed because they love sports, and they wanted the students to have a say.
LOPIANO: I mean, there were student athletes who were part of our convention, part of our voting. You have to remember that AIAW grew out of athlete self-governance.
The women's athletic associations of the '50s, and the '40s, and the '30s were a female faculty member usually -- physical educator, taking a representative from each team to a national convention and they were the people who voted for the rules -- the kids governed. So women's athletics grew out of that. The female athlete was always front and center.
MUHAMMAD: And so, in this way, the women of the AIAW built a unique organization, one philosophically opposed to the NCAA. And as all of this was taking place, Title IX was becoming a reality.
LOPIANO: When Title IX passed, I was naive, I just thought -- well, Title IX's a good thing. Everybody's going to be really excited about it, I didn't think people were not going to be happy with it.
MUHAMMAD: But some people were not happy with Title IX, and they'd start causing problems for the AIAW.
Throughout the 1970s, the NCAA was openly against Title IX. This was largely because of one sport, football. There was a fear that if Title IX was truly and fully enacted, money would be taken out of football programs to support women's programs. The NCAA couldn't let that happen. Donna Lopiano knew this firsthand.
LOPIANO: Football in the south was like going to church. It was part of the fabric of a community. It was a cultural institution; it was palatable the power of football.
MUHAMMAD: Donna Lopiano had just taken a job as the first director of women's athletics at the University of Texas. This university had one of the biggest football programs in the country and so she was used to talking to football coaches and male athletes.
LOPIANO: I would say that most football coaches or most men sports leaders at the time saw intercollegiate athletics as a zero-sum game. If women were going to get part of this pie then men were going to lose their half of the pie. They were like we're going to lose if you win. Instead of, guess what, this is about your sons and daughters both winning. Come on this is what this is all about.
I am sure they never thought about what sport did for young women. They were just worried about young money taking their money. So it was kind of an easy argument to make. And you knew that this argument played with the public. You know, played with the media.
MUHAMMAD: This kind of thinking came to a head in the mid-1970's when a bill was proposed in Congress that would, if passed, seriously weaken Title IX. At this point, Donna was just two-weeks into her new job at the University of Texas.
LOPIANO: I can remember that at the end of my second week I got a call from two attorneys in Washington, D.C. who were attorneys for the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. And there were hearings going on in Congress about how Title IX and women's athletics would be the death of big-time football because, my god, you know, we're going to have to spend money on women's sports.
MUHAMMAD: These hearings centered around the Tower Amendment proposed by Senator John Tower of Texas. Remember Title IX dictated that federal funds must be distributed equally among men and women on college campuses. This bill argued that big money men sports like football and basketball should be exempt from Title IX.
LOPIANO: Since football and basketball were receiving about 90 percent of all the resources it would have totally gutted Title IX. It would have compared the treatment of women to the treatment of about 10 percent of all male athletes. So it was not a wildly popular amendment.
MUHAMMAD: Quick fact check, 90 percent of all resources wasn't the exact number, but Donna wasn't way off. The bill itself said, "That at some schools up to 85 percent of funding for athletic programs came from football and basketball. If the Tower Amendment were to succeed, it would jeopardize all that the AIAW had built
So the organization's lawyers got to work.
LOPIANO: And these attorneys wanted to know whether or not I could get a copy of a big-time football athletic program budget and her I was 29-years old, I was naive and I said, oh, yes, I know Darrel Royal I'll just go and get a copy of his budget.
MUHAMMAD: Darrell Royal was the University of Texas' head football coach and athletic director. Donna says he was more powerful than the President of the university.
LOPIANO: I crossed campus, got him coming out of his office, going to practice, and said, Darrell, can I have a copy of your budget and he said, sure, just ask Betty (ph).
His secretary, Betty (ph). Went in and got the budget from Betty (ph), you know, put it in the mail and a few days later got a call from those same attorneys saying, my god we haven't been able to get a copy of a budget like this.
Can we have a copy of your women's athletic budget too for comparison purposes? And I said, oh, absolutely, mine's on one page because it was only a $90,000 budget.
MUHAMMAD: That $90,000 was meant to support all of the women's teams at the University of Texas. And the football budget?
LOPIANO: The football budget was about $5.5, $6 million. So I got a call a couple days later saying will you come to Washington D.C. and testify before Congress? And my first thought was, wait until I tell my mother.
MUHAMMAD: Donna was being asked to testify against the Tower Amendment as an expert witness in athletics. She still remembers walking into Senator Tower's office in D.C.
LOPIANO: I was really pleased. Everybody in his office was a woman. They were all beautiful women. I think he had hired every Ms. Texas that had every existed. One of these beautiful women said, "The Senator is on the Hill, let's walk up to the Capitol."
And I went to the Senate. And at the time everybody still smoked. There was a haze of smoke. And we're standing I this pretty dark room, you could hear the clacking of heels on marble. And it was almost surreal just standing there.
And in heels I'm about 6'1", so I'm right up there. And I hear this voice, Dr. Lopiano. And I look around and I don't know if you've ever met John Tower but he's 5'6". And I'm looking at the top of his head and I'm saying, oh, my gosh I said Senator Tower, and he was not really a happy camper. And that was my first experience with the Senator.
MUHAMMAD: Donna was one of many who testified against the Tower Amendment and eventually.
LOPIANO: It was defeated three or four times. Congress literally rejected the Tower Amendment multiple times. And it didn't surprise me at all when the Tower Amendment failed in all efforts to exclude football and basketball because this was in the mid-1970's, the middle of the feminist movement. The beginning of women in power.
It was a critical mass in terms of parents realizing how important it was for women to get an education and to help with their family, supporting their families. So we're in that period of time where everyone kind of understood what the stakes were, and it wasn't just about sports.
MUHAMMAD: This wouldn't be the last attack against Title IX. Pretty much every year for the next eight years saw a new challenge to Title IX in women's athletics. Many Senators proposed amendments and critiques of the law. The NCAA aggressively fought Title IX even launching a lawsuit challenging the law, which failed.
But eventually it became pretty clear that title IX wasn't going anywhere. So in the mid-1970's the NCAA started exploring a new strategy. I wasn't if you can't beat then join them, it was if you can't beat them take them over.
LOPIANO: The NCAA takeover of AIAW was all about Walter Byers having the insight to realize that Title IX meant big money was coming into women's sports at the institutional level. And that whoever controlled women's sports was going to control athletic programs too.
MUHAMMAD: Walter Byers was the first Executive Director of the NCAA. He ran the organization from 1951 to 1988.
LOPIANO: Here was this journalist marketer, really good administrator who was a masterful politician kind of person who saw the future pretty clearly in terms of who was going to control the money and how that was going to work. A little Machiavellian but that's, you know, that was par for the course.
When John Tower tried to protect men's football and basketball and was unable to do so legally, and here was Title IX mandating the equal treatment of men and women, the question was going to become: are you going to let the women have the money and do what they want with it or were the men going to control all the money? That was the choice.
And Walter saw that clearly and indeed most male athletic directors saw it clearly. By 1978 they had to have equal opportunity athletic programs according to Title IX. And where was the money going to come from? And a lot of schools said to the male athletic director, here, you're now responsible for women.
MUHAMMAD: Keep in mind the NCAA was already governing male athletic programs at colleges across the country. Now that Title IX was here to stay, they wanted a say in how these new women's programs would be run.
To Donna Lopiano, this was very bad news. But not everyone within the AIAW thought the organization promised the best future for women athletes. And some of those women were very interested in what the NCAA had to say.
LOPIANO: I knew a lot of the men who were in the NCAA, who were in men's sports, and a lot of those men I liked.
MUHAMMAD: Like Carole Oglesby and Donna Lopiano, Judie Holland was an early member of the AIAW. She was also an athletic director at UCLA. She remembers the first AIAW convention in 1972 vividly.
JUDIE HOLLAND, ADMINISTRATOR, UCLA: Oh boy, I remember it like it happened yesterday, it was in Overland, Kansas. And I knew a lot of the people there, I'd been competing against them or talking with them over the years. So this was exciting.
There were two groups of thought. One wanted to be very progressive, and move very fast, and create rules that didn't hinder women. And then there was the other side who wanted to go slow, who didn't want a lot of change very quickly, and who fought everything right to the end. I remember one particular lady, she was funny.
And we were discussing whether or not we would allow books as part of the scholarship. And oh boy, this raged on forever. And she finally got up to the mic and said, well, I think that we ought to include books because every college student should have a book. It kind of released all the tension in the room.
But sad to say we did not include books in the scholarships.
MUHAMMAD: This early debate over scholarship money, over whether to cover books as a part of athletic scholarships for women would get at the crux of what Judie would come to dislike about the AIAW. She wanted to move fast, offer scholarships to the great female athletes of the time. She wanted to treat them just like the men.
HOLLAND: I didn't mind the men's rules, some of them were very good. And they had been tested in time, so I didn't see the problem. But there was this group that literally despised anything that had to do with men's athletics.
Because they were positive that it was filled with graft and people not obeying rules, and money that was paid. So you know, we were carefully stepping through this minefield trying to find, again, the common ground that we could agree on.
MUHAMMAD: But Judie says there were just too many differences among the women leading the AIAW.
HOLLAND: Recruiting was a no, no by some of these women. It was considered something we didn't want to do. As one woman put it to me, why should someone go from North Carolina to California to go to school when they could just stay and go in North Carolina? Well, that's discrimination, I mean, that's the definition of it.
If a young gal wants to go out to California to go to school, fine.
MUHAMMAD: Keep in mind male athletes were being recruited from all over the country to go to top schools. Judie saw this firsthand at UCLA. The NCAA threw thousands of dollars at room, board, scholarships, and travel while the AIAW was trying to limit scholarship money.
HOLLAND: The women did pass a rule, by the way, to limit women's scholarships to just tuition and fees. And I just fought that tooth and nail. And we finally got that reversed at a convention that I happened to be president of.
And there was thunderous applause in that room. And that told me a whole lot, that there were a lot of women that thought just like I did. And we needed to keep on moving this forward.
MUHAMMAD: This emboldened Judie, so in 1978 she took a calculated risk. She was now the president of the AIAW. She had a say in how the organization ran things.
HOLLAND: For many years the AIAW had a basketball championship, we'd all go to Minneapolis, and they would play on courts all over. And I kept trying to tell them there's no focus here until you get to the final game. So I studied the men's model for basketball championship, I sat down and created a plan to get to a final four.
And I don't know how I sold it, but I sold it. I can't remember but I know there were a lot of meetings, I know there was lots of talk back and forth. And I sold this idea of regionals going into this final four. And the final four that year was at UCLA, and it was a huge success. We had 9,000 people in Pauley Pavilion, it only holds 12 so I considered that a huge success.
MUHAMMAD: For a moment Judie thought I did it, I proved to the other members of the AIAW that looking to the men, following their model it wasn't necessarily a bad thing. That moment didn't last.
HOLLAND: So I was watching from the second level just kind of by myself when the chair of the basketball committee came up to me and said, I'd like to talk with you. And so, I said, fine, but the arena was noisy and all this. So we went outside.
And now you have to remember the scenario here my team is playing for the national championship, and this lady wants to talk about problems. We go outside, and she ripped me six ways to Sunday about how everything had gone wrong at this championship.
And I mean, I listened to her for I think it was about 10 minutes, and when she seemed to run out of steam I turned around and walked away, and went back into the arena, and watched my team win a national championship.
But that was the thinking in some of these women that rather than focusing on how good this championship was, focus on all the problems. The problems were like too many cheerleaders, too many bands, I mean, it went on and on.
I was like, what is this lady talking about? I became unhappy because the women that were then in control preferred, as it was called back in the '70s, women's liberation, they burned their bras, they preferred that over creating athletic programs, and athletic championships that really served the needs of the women athletes.
MUHAMMAD: Donna Lopiano, one of the women leading the AIAW disagrees with this. She says the AIAW did serve the needs of women athletes by making sure they got meaningful educations, and opportunities to compete.
Also, she never burned a bra, and says the women in the AIAW were actually fairly conservative. But the point is, Judie Holland had had enough.
In 1975 the NCAA had tried and failed to take over the AIAW. The organization had proposed entering women's sports but top leaders at the AIAW had convinced member schools to vote no. Judie though was convinced that with her help that could change.
JUDIE HOLLAND, ADMINISTRATOR, UCLA: I led the charge, I would be honest with you, I just decided I had had enough of the AIAW. They didn't have the best interest of women athletes at heart. Their position was solid, so my position became solid. To this day I do not regret it.
MUHAMMAD: And the first thing to do organize her allies.
HOLLAND: We thought the same way, and we had a woman from Ohio State, we had person from The University of Arizona, we had someone from Penn State. It was all over the country that there were these pockets of women that felt like we did. And we got together, and we formed a group, and we began to politic.
MUHAMMAD: They began a focus on the people who had the real decision-making power in all of this, the people who participated in these organizations' championships. Coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents.
HOLLAND: We tried to get university presidents on our side. I remember my discussion with Chancellor Young.
MUHAMMAD: Charles Young was the chancellor of UCLA. Essentially the president of the university.
HOLLAND: He came to me one day, and he said, now, what's going on here? And so I tried to explain it to him. And he said, well, what do you think? Should we take the women's program and try to go to the NCAA? Should I try to work within the NCAA to get this to happen? And I said, yes. So I had him on my side, and he was very powerful in the NCAA.
MUHAMMAD: And so, Chancellor Young took Judie's ideas to the NCAA.
HOLLAND: He worked within the structure of the NCAA to try to get this evolved to the point where the NCAA was not taking over the AIAW, the NCAA, and this was what we wanted, would offer programs for women.
MUHAMMAD: And who did Judie think the universities would pick?
HOLLAND: Let's face it, they had money, AIAW did not. And AIAW wasn't interested in getting money, they were interested in perpetuating their own ideas about women's athletics.
MUHAMMAD: In the months that followed many schools were left with a choice, stick with the AIAW or join the NCAA. Louisiana Tech University was one of those schools. Among the decision-makers was the coach of the women's basketball team, Sonja Hogg.
SONJA HOGG, FORMER WOMEN'S HEAD BASKETBALL COACH, LOUISIANA TECH UNIVERSITY: Well, AIAW gave us a feeling of women governing women, I think that's kind of the general feeling that we had. You know, in that AIAW had been our guiding light so to speak.
But those of us at Louisiana Tech and lots of others voted to go NCAA because we felt like that's where the opportunities are. We were moving into a whole new era of NCAA because they had the money, and, you know, like I say, money doesn't talk, money screams.
And so, you know, in the best interest of our student-athletes the one right that they worked as hard or harder and they couldn't get scholarship money.
That just didn't make sense to me. But still, it hurt.
MUHAMMAD: in March of 1982, Sonja Hogg and her reigning AIAW champions, the Lady Techsters headed to Norfolk, Virginia for the NCAA tournament in women's basketball. They would make it all the way to the championship game where they would defeat Cheyney State, becoming the top team in the nation for a second year in a row.
That same day just about 300 miles away another national basketball championship was taking place in Philadelphia. It was being run by the AIAW. NBC did not broadcast the AIAW tournament, in fact, it's not clear if the tournament was televised at all. Soon after the AIAW folded, no organization of its kind has existed since.
We reached out to the NCAA about the association's decision to enter women's sports. This is what the organization had to say in part. Quote, "Although there is mixed sentiment about women's competition, and who should lead it in the 1970s and '80s, the NCAA has been a strong supporter of Title IX and women's athletics for 30 years."
Thirty years, that suggests the NCAA only became a strong supporter of Title IX in women's athletics in the '90s. This is what Donna Lopiano had to say about the demise of the AIAW.
DONNA LOPIANO, FORMER COLLEGE ATHLETE: AIAW was the right organization for the right time in the sense that the most powerful women in education they were tough, tough mutts here. And they were faculty members; people don't realize how much these women on campus were leaders. And that was the group that AIAW together.
And they were so strong that they tried not to repeat the same mistakes as men. They were saying, hey, something's wrong with this scholarship business, are we paying players to play? Is this going to get out of control? So that was the (inaudible) that AIAW grew up in.
MUHAMMAD: Of course, not everyone saw it that way.
HOLLAND: I'm sure that people thought I betrayed them. I had a lot of hate mail during that time, my secretary would get it, I'd tell her just throw it away. It was a difficult time to tell you the truth. It wasn't easy for me, people that I considered my friend for a long time would not speak to me.
There was a lot of talk that I had been bought off by the NCAA. I'm going to tell you right now, nobody can buy me off, I am my own person, I have been since the day I was born. I did what I thought was right, and I did what my heart told me to do. I was fighting for a cause.
MUHAMMAD: Judie Holland's cause had won out. The NCAA would enter women's sports, and it would change everything. In a way, Judie would get everything she had hoped for because the NCAA's entrance into women's basketball would bring about a whole new level of professionalism for these athletes.
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MUHAMMAD: That's next time on "In Their Court."
"In Their Court" is written and produced by Preeti Varathan and Abe Selby. Olivia Richard is our associate producer. Additional production help and fact-checking from Amelia Acosta and Sarah Hughes. Original music by Jesse McGinty.
Sound design by Rick Kwan. Bryson Barnes is our technical director. Steven Roberts and Reid Cherlin are our executive producers. Madeleine Haeringer is our head of editorial. Special thanks to Patrick Hart.
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